


forgotten as a dead man out of mind

by bropunzeling



Category: Kings
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-18
Updated: 2013-01-18
Packaged: 2017-11-25 21:42:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/643267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bropunzeling/pseuds/bropunzeling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Gath, David meets a prophet. In Gath, David meets doubt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	forgotten as a dead man out of mind

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the mythology ficathon on lj; takes place post-finale. Entirely possible that it's a little ooc, for which I apologize in advance.

Here is what they do not tell you about the will of God: when they say “mysterious ways”, they mean “fuck all if you’ll ever know”.

 

Natalia is tiny and bird-boned, a fourteen-year-old with big eyes and hair covered by a headscarf. The skin of her hands, peeking out underneath long black sleeves, looks the color of the bark on trees that David climbed at the farmhouse, back when the sound of his name didn’t seem so much like failure.

She stares him down in a farmhouse in Gath, sees the dirt covering his face and staining his hair, and says in a voice too big for her body, “Shepherd”.

It sounds nothing like absolution.

 

This is Gath: dry, dusty, a few trees scattered by unceasing wind. The sun is high and hot and unrelenting, and it beats into his back.

There’s a network of caves close to the southern border, close to Gilboa. He sleeps in each one, careful to switch every night so he never starts calling one home. Sometimes he hears water dripping, wind whistling on through, the earth stretching and moving and shifting while he’s stuck in limbo, unknowing and unknown.

 

“God sees you, David,” Natalia says, syllables booming around him, and her hands are shaking but not her voice. “God sees you, and he knows you, and he will make you a leader of men. He has a plan for you. You have to believe that.”

David stares at her, sees the bones in her wrists and her knuckles white. She looks tired, and he wonders about a God who lets his prophet live in a country that’s starving itself to death.

“And his plan is to let me be lost” he mutters, and he pretends he doesn’t see her shoulders tense.

 

In the desert, in this fucking maze of a desert, where the sand gets under his skin and strips him raw, he sees a bird circling the sun. It flies above his head for hours, unrelenting in its flight, and eventually he gives in, watches it make a path through clouds as he plods along behind it. 

When he sees the trees shimmering above the sand, he glances up, but by now the hawk has flown away. Typical, he thinks. Fucking typical.

 

On his twelfth (or is it thirteenth? it’s hard to keep track anymore) day of hiding, he stumbles across a camp of deserters, their uniforms the most familiar thing he’s seen. He hides in the caves, stays in familiar territory, and blends himself into the rock walls. It’s like playing hide and seek back on the farm with his brothers, except they have guns, and they aren’t his brothers.

Occasionally a gunshot will ring out and he stiffens, flattening his palms on the stone and thinking _dearGodohGodofmyfathersGod_ and it’s only just barely that the syllables stay silent against his lips.

He supposes his prayers are answered each time nothing happens, but whatever thanks he gives afterwards always sounds belligerent in his head.

He accidentally kicks a pebble, and it sets off one of the birds nesting in the cave below. It’s just a bird, the deserters yell over the rocks, the echoes magnifying their voices into a choir. Nothing to worry about, the stones sing.

At night, with a new moon and dim stars, he slips away. At least in the desert the bullets aren’t guaranteed.

 

He misses things, out here in the desert. He misses his mother and brothers; he misses the smell of engine grease on his skin and the sound of church bells. He even misses Shiloh a little, just for being a familiar kind of adversity if nothing else.

Every step in the sand, he misses something else. Every drop of sweat, the questions and the fury catch and scrape under his skin. 

This can’t be everything. This can’t be all.

 

She traces a map on the ground, quickly describing a man he has to find, a man who will hide him in Gath until it’s time for him to go to Shiloh, to a king and his children, to a crown of butterflies. To home, she tells him, strong in her surety, and even through the bitterness knotting up his throat he believes her. 

He watches her hands sketch in the dirt, wind-chapped and small and infinitely cleaner than his will ever be.

When she stands up, he rises, and the words burst out without him thinking. “Will I see you?” he asks, and the question scrapes in his throat as he feels the loss of something he wasn’t sure he could miss anymore.

She startles, and says, “I – I don’t know.”

Of course, he doesn’t say, of course you don’t.


End file.
